Life after formalism: in the 1960s, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Larry Poons were often corralled together as Greenberg-approved modernists. In recent years, however, their work has developed in diverse and surprising directions - Critical Essay

F Scott Fitzgerald could have been talking about the art world when he observ that there are no next to the first acts in American lives. Artists are assigned to the trice when they first attracted public attention and immovably associated with the work that established their reputations--no allowance for unravelling or variation over time. Anthony Cam, for example, whose work has evolv and changed above four decades, is frequently discussed as admitting he had done nothing on the other hand the lean, linear, painted carbonized iron constructions he first showed in the early 1960 His friend Helen Frankenthaler, a highly inventive artist with an exhibition history as distinguished and flat longer than Cam's, is frequently identified mainly with her fragile, luminous Mountains and Sea of 1953 the picture that marked the beginning of stain painting. Caro's and Frankenthaler's equally productive colleagues Kenneth Noland, Jule Olitski and Larry Peon have been similarly pigeonholed.

The work of all these artists, rather clumsily labeled "Post-Painterly Abstraction," "new sculpture" or "Color Field" painting, was extensively and enthusiastically discussed by the agency of the formalist critics of the 1960 and '70 greatest in quantity notably by Clement Greenberg, and widely exhibited and eagerly gathered internationally in those years. During the 1980 and '90 when postmodernist irony and issues of identity politics increasingly eclipsed formal interests museums that owned Color Field paintings and set uped metal sculptures installed them les not seldom and awarded their steadfastly modernist authors sole token recognition when they organized broad' overview exhibitions. In the Guggenheim's admittedly capricious 1996 view "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century" for example, Frankenthaler was exhibited by a single painting from 1958 and Cam appeared single in the catalogue. Noland, Olitski and Peon (along with, it must be said, many other significant painters and sculptors) were excluded

Was it because Greenberg had been among their greatest in quantity outspoken supporters? During the years when denouncing Greenberg was apparently obligatory for any critic, curator or art historian with aspirations of being taken seriously, his liking for a certain number of of these artists was repeatedly cited as evidence of the fallibility of his a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of vaunted taste, Now, however, unironic abstraction is being taken seriously one time again. Museums are rehanging their Color Field paintings, and commercial galleries are revisiting the 1960 and '70 The Portland Art Museum, in Oregon, not long ago acquired Greenberg's own collection-vivid evidence of his shut up ties with several generations of modernist artists--and exhibited it last summer to attentive hosts and enthusiastic reviews [see p 100]

Since flat dedicated Clem-bashers would grudgingly surrender the importance of the artists he championed--at least, at the start of their careers--this revived appreciation for the work of similar "historically significant" modernists as Caro, Frankenthaler, Noland, Olitski and Poon is not altogether surprising. What is more meditation provoking is that last winter's novel York showing of Olitski's novel paintings at Ameringer/Howard/Yohe was fix uponed by art historian Robert Rosenblum as single of the 10 best exhibitions of 2000 for Artforum, while the common work of his colleagues has elicited similar serious attention, including coverage in more [i]or[/i] less of the alternative art press

What these exhibitions mean is debatable. Perhaps the zeitgeist is one time again sympathetic to the regards of these artists, or perhaps it's simply that enough time has passed since Greenberg's death in 1994 for the art that he praised to be judg upon its own merits rather than in relation to his famously difficult personality. The situation is complicated by dint of the fact that the work of Olitski, Noland and their colleagues has changed in new years. Cynics explain this through noting that Greenberg no longer of frequent occurrences their studios. The historically minded point to the well-documented phenomenon of a late mode of expression a more plausible reason, given the artists' ages. (Care, Olitski and Noland are in their late 70 Frankenthaler in her early 70 and Poon about 10 years younger.) Not that their art was at any time static. Far from being frozen in the jiffy when their work first announced them as artists to be calculateed with, Caro, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Noland and Poon have wearied the last four decades or in like manner developing the implications of their early innovations and, as they matured, exploring, too, a entertainer of other ideas, including, greatest in quantity recently, notions diametrically opposed to the issues that engaged them greatest in quantity deeply at the start of their careers.

of that kind transgressions--if that's not too lusty a word--against their own beginnings may actually be the strongest for the use of all factor in the diverse new work of these remarkably individual artists. Each of them remains dedicated to the fundamental creeds of modernist abstraction--that a painting or statuary is about the history of its have making, for example--but at the same time, their new efforts demand to be discussed in boundarys of things once assumed to be anathema to formalist artists: illusionism, respect and even narrative. Paradoxically, these seemingly novel concerns often reprise directions briefly explored and abandoned earlier in their careers, now reexamined in light of a lifetime's experience.